Past, present and future travels around the United States in our motorhomes.

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Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Unexpected New Found Wealth

The old saying goes: “Even a blind pig sometimes finds a truffle”. It has happened to us. No, we’re not blind pigs and I wouldn’t know a truffle if I fell over one.

Lady Luck does smile on people occasionally, after all someone has to win the lottery. Lady Luck did smile on me, finally, after all these years and I didn’t even have to buy a lottery ticket.

When we sold our house back in November 2011 to hit the road full time, there were a number of deposits to get refunded for various things associated with homeownership. Cable boxes, water meters, phone equipment, HOA dues and so forth. Some of the refunds came right away, which we made good use of as we motored around the good old USA.

Other refunds took a while, including three months worth of mortgage payments the bank (Wells Fargo) automatically withdrew from our checking account after we paid the balance of the mortgage off, and had received the letter from them acknowledging the pay off. That was fun.

So it was a surprise when 14 months after the house sold, we got a check in the mail as a refund from our electric company.

Manna from heaven! Unexpected new found wealth. We’ve been dreaming of how we’re going to use this extra money. Should we invest it? Go on a cruise? Maybe a down payment on that new Winnebago Tour Marti has had her eye on? We’re open to ideas.

So we’ve been hanging on to the check, waiting to cash it until we have a clear direction of what to do. One thing is for sure, we’re only going to spend it in one place!

Talk about waste! Perhaps that electric company is making way too much money. I can think of one or two cost cutting programs they should start. One would be to do away with the person in charge of processing that check! However, not your problem. I think you should take it and put it on a down payment for a cruise .... just see how far you'd get.

I had one of those ... but in reverse. A former dentist's office billed me for a couple of cents and would not hear of rolling it over to my next visit. I dropped off a check at their office. The stupid thing is that they spent 36 cents to mail it to me .... go figure.

I guess they paid you for your thoughts! I am not surprised to see that it was only a penny though. You would think they would have enough money that they could pay someone to come up with some software that would stop wasteful cheques like this.

Who are we?

Paul is a retired career U.S. Coast Guard Chief Warrant Officer (1981 to 2011) and Marti is a retired Nursing Home Administrator. We currently (2014) have three children, all married and eight grandkids.
We have traveled all around the U.S. in a high-speed, part time travel mode, whetting our desire to travel fulltime in our RV. On December 5, 2011, we realized our dream and headed out on the road as newly minted full time RV travelers.